Google for Jakob Nielsen and you'll often find him described as a "web design guru". He's also the man that some web designers love to hate. In particular, they love to heap abuse on his website - UseIt.com.

It's a decade-old design and it wouldn't take much effort to make it look nicer, would it? More importantly, surely he ought to be following all his own guidelines on usability.

Nielsen is not a graphic designer, and he reckons that smartening it up would put him in the middle range of site designs: "I'd be just one out of 10m. Redesigning it would take away the real value, which is that it stands out. But I'm probably the only one who could get away with it. I wouldn't recommend it to somebody starting out now!"

Although Use It annoys the people who think web design is graphic design, Nielsen doesn't mind. "There is something good about upsetting people, because it's making an impact," he says. But, he adds: "It's not good if you only annoy people," and you have to offer something of value.

'My site stands out'

Nielsen evaluates sites using principles described by Don Norman, his partner in the Nielsen Norman Group, in his book, Emotional Design (see arts.theguardian.com). The idea is that all designs work in three main ways: visceral, behavioural and reflective. Use It might upset people at the visceral level - if they immediately dislike the look of it - but Nielsen reckons it works well on the behavioural and reflective levels. "On the behavioural level - in actual use - it scores pretty well," Nielsen says. It's fast, has readable text, is fairly easy to use, and so on. "On the reflective level - what does it say about you -my site stands out like a protest against the overly glamorous, flashy sites. So it scores really high."

Nielsen is careful to point out that he's not making recommendations for all websites. There's no reason why people can't go mad on their MySpace pages, or create sites that are complex and challenging for, say, geeks or gamers. But his main focus is on sites where people go to get something done, such as look up a timetable, buy a car or take out a loan.

He's also very closely involved with intranets - in-house webs where companies provide things for staff, from news to forms for claiming expenses. In these cases, even quite small usability improvements can bring enormous financial benefits, justifying high fees.

"Who are the users and what are they trying to do?" Nielsen says. "So what is a good interface for computer engineers is not a good interface for the average person. A lot of computer guys don't recognise that, and it creates problems."

Nielsen's approach is to test usability using one or preferably more real users. Unlike the site's designers and other company employees, real users don't know what they're supposed to do, and often won't take the time to find out. "One of the main reasons companies need systematic usability studies is to make explicit the fact that outside customers don't find your design as important as you do," he writes in his latest column on Use it.

According to Nielsen Norman research, "users visiting a new site spend an average of 30 seconds on the homepage and less than two minutes on the entire site before deciding to abandon it. They spend a bit more time if they decide to stay on a site, but still only four minutes on average." If they have to spend 15 of their 30 seconds figuring out which link to click on your home page, you've probably lost them. He says: "Thus, websites should have almost no features: focus on the words."

Plenty of people make a living adding features with Adobe's Flash and Sun's Java, so you can add a few more to Nielsen's piles of potential haters.

He added a few more recently by posting an article that upset some bloggers, including ex-Microsoft geek Robert Scoble. In Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, Nielsen wrote: "To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.". That's the aim on Use It, where casual visitors can be converted into buying reports or attending conferences, and so on.

User loyalty

But Nielsen's point is that short and generally superficial blog posts are a commodity, and it's difficult to make yours any better than thousands of others. It's hard to build up any user loyalty that way. "One longer post beats many small pieces given superficial treatment, which will essentially be free, so maybe you can get people to pay for it - maybe not in money, but in a registration, or whatever."

He makes a similar point about short videos. People can get an audience on YouTube, but by building up their own sites and "a loyal viewer base, they could actually make money out of T-shirts and DVDs and so on" he says. "In the long run, how you get value from being online is that users become regulars. If compiling other people's work is how you get value, like YouTube does, that isn't good news."

What worries him is search engine domination: Google "takes a big percentage of the money," he says."The web is a web, and that is good, but companies invest a lot of money in creating content, and the money goes to Google for indexing it." Google drives lots of traffic to a great many sites, but it's delivering "no-value users. So they look at one article, but they never go there again," Nielsen says.

But what could you do, boycott it?

"That would only work if everybody did it. You would have to get all of them to agree, and that's essentially impossible. So we have to do something else, and it has to be something that encourages user buy-in and creates loyalty."

Looking forward five years or more, Nielsen thinks sites should try to get themselves in users' "need to know" category rather than "nice to know". It's a fair bet that, in another decade, Use It will still be in the "need to know" category, at least for web designers who are interested in usability. Whether it will look nice is another matter. I wouldn't bet on it.

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